The Canadian government had at that time detained Ms Meng, the chief financial officer of Chinese tech giant Huawei, on US fraud charges.
The “two Michaels” were only freed nearly two years later, after US prosecutors dropped the extradition request and agreed to release Ms Meng.
“It was the most gruelling, painful thing I’ve ever been through,” said Mr Kovrig in an interview with Canadian public broadcaster CBC that aired on Monday night.
Describing his ordeal for the first time, Mr Kovrig said that on the night he was arrested he was walking home from dinner in Beijing with his partner, who was six months pregnant at the time.
“We came up a spiral staircase right in front of the plaza in front of my apartment building, and boom,” he said.
“There’s a dozen men in black with cameras on them surrounding us, shouting in Chinese, ‘That’s him.’”
Mr Kovrig, a former diplomat who was working as a senior advisor for the International Crisis Group think tank at the time, said he was then handcuffed, blindfolded and thrown into a black SUV.
After being driven for almost an hour, he was taken into a padded cell, where he would remain for several months.
“At that point they said, ‘You are under suspicion of endangering China’s state security. You are going to be interrogated,’” Mr Kovrig said. “A chill went down my spine.”
Mr Kovrig alleged his treatment by the Chinese authorities broke international law.
“The United Nations standard is no more than 15 days in solitary confinement. More than that is considered psychological torture. I was there for nearly six months,” he said.
He added that he was kept in complete isolation under fluorescent lights for six months, while being subjected to six to nine hours of interrogation a day.
Often, he said, he was locked in a chair for hours on end and at times was forced to survive on three bowls of rice per day.
“They are trying to bully and torment and terrorise and coerce you into accepting their false version of reality,” Mr Kovrig said.
